| Filmmaker Magazine

HOW TO FIX TIME WARNER

I linked to Erick Schonfeld in the post below and now just see on Anne Thompson’s blog this link to a new piece of his, “5 Ways to Fix Time Warner.” It’s a very interesting piece with ideas that should be considered by anyone distributing media today. For example, Schonfeld advocates a move away from the blockbuster to the “nichebuster”: Once the businesses are organized around audience niches, creating blockbusters becomes less necessary. Instead, media businesses that are focused on narrow audiences will naturally give rise to the more cost-effective “nichebuster.” A nichebuster is any kind of content that becomes […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2006

SHARING THE WEALTH

A depressing element of the music filesharing revolution has been the suggestion by its proponents that tour income and t-shirt sales will be the new revenue model for bands losing the royalties they would have (in a perfect world) received from consumers buying their music. I’ve wondered, what if a band or musician didn’t want to spend his life touring and just wanted to make records? Obviously a similar challenge is about to face filmmakers as increasing storage capacities and new digital download services arise to reshape the way films are distributed. Already sites like the Google Video Store and […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2006

THE RIGHTS STUFF

I’ll have more to say in a future post about the situation in France involving iTunes and Apple’s proprietary “Fair Play” technology. Briefly, the French government is considering a bill which would require Apple to share it’s proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology so that a consumer could play songs downloaded on iTunes on any iPod-competing music player. This is big news for Apple, as it threatens the near-monopoly they’ve developed on portable music players and online music downloads. And as iTunes is positioned to be a market leader in movie downloads as well, anything that challenges their business model […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 22, 2006

THE POWER OF NARRATIVE

Green Cine notes this interesting piece by Andrew Tracy in Cinema Scope about the new director’s cut DVD of James Gray’s The Yards. He’s got a great opener, a provocative discussion of what he sees as the diminished respect given classical movie narrative today that winds up as a preamble for his discussion of Gray’s ’70s-inspired gangster pic. From the piece: As a means of telling us about our world, classical narrative cinema—that is, American narrative cinema—has been steadily losing ground. James Agee’s faith in the scenario seems somewhat quaint in the midst of our fascination with hybridity. Documentary, whether […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 22, 2006

FRIENDS IN NEED

The Association of Independent Film and Videomakers is one of the country’s oldest media arts groups as well as publisher of The Independent. It recently announced a reinvention due to a financial crisis and is calling on members and supporters in the indie community to help. Click on the links above and let the organization itself tell you how they are reorganizing and how you can aid them in this pressing time of need, or listen to filmmakers like Paul Harrill, who, on his blog, spells out the reasons why he’s sending them $100 and is urging you to do […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2006

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

Over at his Video Watchblog, Tim Lucas self-analyzes his compulsive DVD collecting, tracing it back to an incident in his youth: When I was six or seven years old, my mother married a man who, a week or two into their short-lived marriage, sold every toy and comic book I owned in a yard sale and used the money to get drunk. When I was sixteen years old, I made the decision to leave home and, for various reasons, I could take with me only what I could carry. Aside from clothes and other essentials I could fit into two […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2006

LEGENDS OF DIY

Caveh Zahedi has a blog up promoting his new film, I am a Sex Addict, which is opening from IFC Films next month. So far there’s been a lot of talk about porn star Rebecca Lord’s nipple (which would be pictured, but Blogger’s been having a problem uploading pictures, which is why photo placement on this blog is kind of erratic), but the blog is also prompting discussion of the efficacy of sef-distribution today. Zahedi, you’ll remember, was prepared to go the DIY route with his new I am a Sex Addict until IFC picked up the film following its […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2006

SPEAKING OF…

Jim Jarmusch has directed a video for The Raconteurs, a band featuring Jack White of the White Stripes and Brendon Benson. It’s in his grainy Year of the Horse mode and it can be found here.

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2006

BADA BING!

Over at his blog, Matt Zoller Seitz asks the question that, consciously or not, is in Sopranos fan’s minds as we watch the last season of the HBO series: In this final season, is Chase truly revealing a sense of moral accountability that was often AWOL on “The Sopranos,” or just jerking our chain? In past seasons, the writers and producers responded to audience gripes about dangling plot threads by saying, in essence, “Some episodes of this show are not chapters in a novel, they’re the equivalent of self-contained short stories with recurring characters — we’re not about plot, so […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2006

10% ON THE DOLLAR

Anne Thompson has another good “Risky Business” column up in which she answers something that I’ve been wondering. The focus of the column is on how the various “window-busting” theatrical/DVD release experiments, including Soderbergh’s Bubble, have panned out, and the second half talks about Ben Rekhi’s Waterborne, which I’ve written about before on this blog. I was interested in knowing how Rekhi’s film did in its premiere on the Google Video Store, and Thompson has the disappointing news. The film’s online premiere seemed like a minor success story, with 3,000 downloads, until the final accounting came in: But then Google […]

by Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2006

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